Life

Lewis was born in New York City, the son of Hyman and Clara Lewis, Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants.

He lived in China, working as a reporter on the Shanghai Evening Post in 1930 and on the China Press in 1931 and 1932.

He returned to New York City and married Gita Jacobson in December, 1933. They had two children, Michael and Jane.

He worked as a reporter for the New York Journal, but quit to work as an independent writer. Although he sold several stories to Esquire (magazine)

Esquire (magazine)

Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

, he was forced to declare bankruptcy by the time he sold his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, to the Viking Press

Viking Press

Viking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...

 in 1937.

He moved to Hollywood and worked as a scenario writer for MGM in 1937. He contributed to the screenplay for the 1939 film, Fisherman's Wharf and wrote the original story for Escape to Paradise. He returned to New York City in 1939 and worked for the J. Walter Thompson

JWT

JWT is one of the largest advertising agencies in the United States and the fourth-largest in the world. It is one of the key companies of Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP Group and is headquartered in New York. The global agency is led by Worldwide Chairman and Global CEO Bob Jeffrey who took over the...

 advertising agency. He returned to reporting, joining the news staff of the New York Herald Tribune

New York Herald Tribune

The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...

 in 1942.

He returned to Hollywood in 1942 after 20th Century Fox bought the film rights to his story, "Two-Faced Qulligan" for $25,000. The story was originally published in [Story (magazine)]. It was filmed in 1945 as Two-Faced Quilligan. His story "D-Day in Las Vegas" was made into the movie Lady Luck (1946), and he contributed to the screenplay for Free for All (1949), which was based on his story, "Patent Applied For."

His most notable accomplishment in Hollywood was his story, "The Fifth Avenue Story," which he sold to the director Frank Capra

Frank Capra

Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...

. Capra in turn sold it to Roy Del Ruth, who filmed it in 1947 as It Happened on Fifth Avenue. Lewis and his co-writer, Frederick Stephani, were nominated for the 1947 Academy Award for Best Story

Academy Award for Best Story

The Academy Award for Best Story was an Academy Award given from the beginning of the Academy Awards until 1957, when it was eliminated in favor of the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay, which had been introduced in 1940.-1920s:...

. They lost to Valentine Davies

Valentine Davies

Valentine Davies was an American film and television writer, producer, and director. His credits included Miracle on 34th Street , Chicken Every Sunday , The Bridges at Toko-Ri , and The Benny Goodman Story...

, who won for Miracle on 34th Street

Miracle on 34th Street

Miracle on 34th Street is a 1947 Christmas film written by George Seaton from a story by Valentine Davies, directed by George Seaton and starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn...

.

Lewis suffered a nervous breakdown in 1948 and was unable to work for a year after. He returned to New York in 1949 and was working as a contributing editor of Time magazine when he died of a heart attack.

Works

Lewis published three novels between 1937 and 1940. Gentleman Overboard was a black comedy

Black comedy

A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...

 about a Wall Street

Wall Street

Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...

 banker who falls overboard while travelling on a freighter in the South Pacific and drowns. Time

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

 magazine's reviewer wrote of the book, "His hair-raising little tour de force is the more effective for being so quietly, matter-of-factly written." His second novel, Spring Offensive, was an anti-war piece that depicted the sufferings of an American serving in the British Army who becomes trapped between lines on the day of the first German assault on the Maginot Line

Maginot Line

The Maginot Line , named after the French Minister of War André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defences, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in light of its experience in World War I,...

. At the time of its publication, the Phony War

Phony War

The Phoney War was a phase early in World War II – in the months following Britain and France's declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 and preceding the Battle of France in May 1940 – that was marked by a lack of major military operations by the Western Allies against the German Reich...

 was still going on along the French-German border, but within weeks the German Blitzkrieg

Blitzkrieg

For other uses of the word, see: Blitzkrieg Blitzkrieg is an anglicized word describing all-motorised force concentration of tanks, infantry, artillery, combat engineers and air power, concentrating overwhelming force at high speed to break through enemy lines, and, once the lines are broken,...

attack on France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 and the Low Countries

Low Countries

The Low Countries are the historical lands around the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, including the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany....

 took place and the novel was quickly forgotten.

His third novel, Season's Greetings, follows the inhabitants of a Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...

 rooming house on a Christmas Eve. Its theme is “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people,” as one character puts it.

Lewis' last novel, Silver Dark, which tells the story of a romance between two people with physical deformities, was published posthumously in 1959 by Pyramid Books. Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg was an American screenwriter, television producer, novelist and sports writer. He was known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954 Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his 1957 screenplay for A Face in the...

praised it as "A genuinely interesting and compelling novel".

Novels

• Gentleman Overboard (1937)
• Spring Offensive (1940)
• Season's Greetings (1941)
• Silver Dark (1959)

External links

• Neglectedbooks.com Review of Gentleman Overboard
• Neglectedbooks.com Review of Spring Offensive
• Neglectedbooks.com Review of Season's Greetings
• Neglectedbooks.com Review of Silver Dark